How YouTube Videos Rank in Google

Just how powerful is YouTube when it comes to ranking in Google search? That’s the question I’ll seek to address in today’s post. I’ll do that by looking at the frequency of placement in the Google search results for two different types of queries, and then comparing those rankings against how other videos rank.

The TL;DR is that YouTube videos rank far more frequently in the top 10 than videos that are either self-hosted, or hosted on other video platforms. Also of interest is that YouTube videos usually don’t rank out of the top 30, suggesting that some other type of ranking algo is in play for ranking them.

The Basic Data

We looked at 6,145 queries that were somewhat likely to generate a video result. Four hundred of these queries literally had the word “videos” or “clips” as part of the query. One example is “willie wonka clips”. The remaining 5,745 queries were “how to” type queries, or queries that might imply a “how to”. An example of this is “how to make apple pie”.

We then looked to see where the YouTube videos rank, as well as embedded YouTube videos and native videos. Here is a look at the resulting data:

Eighty-eight percent of the videos in the top 10 are from YouTube. It’s also interesting to see that YouTube videos clearly tend to be highly biased toward ranking in the top 30, and far fewer rank lower in the results. Here is a view of the data that will help illustrate that:

Of the ranking YouTube videos, 89.6 percent rank in the top 30. In contrast, embedded YouTube videos or native videos are pretty evenly spread through the top 100.

Summary

In addition, I asked Gary Illyes at Pubcon about YouTube ranking in Google search. Here is what he said:

Gary: YouTube is like a different company. The fact that you see YouTube results in video search is because they do good SEO, or their pages are structured in such a way that it’s easy for us to understand them and to rank. With that train of thought, if you wanted to create something that can compete with YouTube, then you probably want to do something like…

Eric, thanks! It’s a great article and metrics! I have always used YouTube videos for better ranking and also better UX (like also pointed on his comment). I just couldn’t imagine how big the dominance was. Really amazing!